Internet Archive's in-browser bookreader "theater" requires JavaScript to be enabled. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature.

235p Technopoly Neil Postman

Topics: progress, convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, abundance, penicillin versus prayers, mobility versus family roots, genie out of the bottle, cultural incoherence, information glut, scientism, symbol drain

Collection: folkscanomy_miscellaneous; folkscanomy; additional_collections

Item Size: 99.1M

The mass media critic (1931-2003) was called "prolific and influential" in the NYT obituary. He published this late book on the Technopoly in 1992 "to describe, how, and why technology", although being "both friend and enemy", ultimately "became a particularly dangerous enemy", following in the footsteps of like-minded spirits such as Lewis Mumford, Arnold Gehlen or Ivan Illich. Technopoly "is totalitarian technocracy", puts "Old World values" on the extinction list and strives to establish a "technological theology" (46-50).

Addeddate: 2021-03-31 16:27:01

Identifier: 235p-technopoly-neil-postman

Identifier-ark: ark:/13960/t3136br64

Ocr: tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236

Ocr_autonomous: true

Ocr_detected_lang: en

Ocr_detected_lang_conf: 1.0000

Ocr_detected_script: Latin

Ocr_detected_script_conf: 1.0000

Ocr_module_version: 0.0.12

Ocr_parameters: -l eng+Latin

Page_number_confidence: 93.16

plus-circle Add Review

comment
Reviews (1)

Reviewer: Dr. M. Karl - - October 28, 2022 (edited)
Subject: A peek-a-boo world (70): On its way to “totalitarian technocracy” (48)?

The famous mass media critic (1931-2003) was called "prolific and influential" in the NYT obituary. He published this late book on the Technopoly in 1991 ... "to describe, how, and why technology", although being "both friend and enemy", ultimately "became a particularly dangerous enemy", following in the footsteps of like-minded spirits such as Lewis Mumford, Arnold Gehlen, Jacques Ellul, Sigfried Giedion, Arnold Koestler, Jeremy Rifkin, Aldous Huxley, J. Weizenbaum, or Ivan Illich. 30 years later, after Corona and after the start of an outragious war at European´s eastern borders, some may rather wish to read an apologetic praise of modern technology - that has helped to globalize economy, to sort out the paper mess in offices or to connect chatting individuals all over the globe. It may well have also contributed to mass migration, the impact of terrorism or further pollution of the planet - which we can moodily sing in a song like the fabulous Joni Michell - “I´ve looked from both sides now”, her topic being uncontroversial natural clouds and not the complex assessment of technological implications. It is surely easier to praise than to criticize (to be fair), but Neil Postman was not the man to do us this favor. To do him justice we may remind scholars that his book was published before the word wide web or the ubiquous smart phones became an essential part of the human Lebensform in practically every country of our shaken planet. To do him justice we are also advised to pick some raisins out of this densely packed and erudit grapevine of text. Postman sees us, mankind, as “technical creatures, and through our predilections for and our ability to create techniques we achieve high levels of clarity and efficiency.” (142) In Goethe´s Zauberlehrling, an early draft of his later Faust-Tragedy, the apprentice can not control the forces he has called forth by some weird Zaubersprüche - as Doktor Faust can not prevent his becoming addicted to Mephisto´s clever ways of dealing with earthly powers. Ulrich Gaier has therefore called Mephisto “einen Zauberer der Wunscherfüllung”, not unlike the computers and the internet of our day and age. This cultural heritage provides no fertile soil, however, for appreciating any heroic role of technology and technicians / engineers in the course of human history. From the old greek word for craftsmen (Banausen) to Talcott Parson´s reappraisal of engineers as a new class of high priests we cover the space-time of some 2000 years, and Neil Postman did of course know his ropes: “In Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness” adding a quote from George Bernard Shaw “that all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” (90) But in the eyes of Postman the case is much worse: “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.“ (48) And the historical process implied a boost in probably the wrong direction: “Technocracy does not have as its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique. Technopoly does” (52), and “Americans were better prepared to undertake the creation of a Technopoly than anyone else.(...) These conditions provided the background, the context in which the American distrust of constraints, the exploitative genius of its captains of industry, the successes of technology, and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly.” (55) In Technopoly, Postman claimed, we as “technical creatures” are driven to extremes: a) to “the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to "access" information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented“ (61) and b) to “the milieu in which Technopoly flourishes”; it “is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.” Postman speaks in this context of “a peek-a-boo world”. (70) And furthermore: “Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.(...) Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved.” (71) Postman is now at the core of the subtitle of his late book and his (if you will) legacy: "Undeniably, fewer and fewer people are bound in any serious way to Biblical or other religious traditions as a source of compelling attention and authority, the result of which is that they make no moral decisions, only practical ones. This is still another way of defining Technopoly. The term is aptly used for a culture whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain.” (72) For Postman Technopoly comes (and probably goes) with a moral void: “The Technopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.” (179) And further above he argued: “Philosophers may agonize over the questions "What is truth?" "What is intelligence?" "What is the good life?" But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with” (93), again with not much remorse for his own fellow countrymen (Landsleute): “That American Technopoly has now embraced the computer in the same hurried and mind-less way it embraced medical technology is undeniable, was perhaps inevitable, and is certainly most unfortunate. This is not to say that the computer is a blight on the symbolic landscape; only that, like medical technology, it has usurped powers and enforced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have wished to deny it.” (107) This has consequences for schools, subjects and teaching. Postman refers to the teaching of history: “To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them only with a stream of meaningless events.” (191) It is about time to turn to some aspects of his topic where Postman manifestly got it wrong or couldn´t see what smartphones and internet would do to the younger generations: “We might even say that in Technopoly precise knowledge is preferred to truthful knowledge but that in any case Technopoly wishes to solve, once and for all, the dilemma of subjectivity. In a culture in which the machine, with its impersonal and endlessly repeatable operations, is a controlling metaphor and considered to be the instrument of progress, subjectivity becomes profoundly unacceptable. Diversity, complexity, and ambiguity of human judgment are enemies of technique.” (158) Today´s scholars would (like UNESCO) disagree on that and might find other grievances in Postman´s analysis like a somewhat unclear if not blurred mixing up of information, media, tools, education or bureaucracy. Scholars might find the text here incoherent (as I do). Strangely enough - to conclude this extended short introduction - Postman did not yet use words like artificial intelligence, cyberspace or virtual reality. Why, pray, did he always refer to information and never to facts - where computers would have a hardly surpassable competence in its own right? Even the majestic St. Giles cathedral in Edinburgh, where the coffin of Queen Elisabeth II. was put to rest on her southbound last journey recently, has a puzzling motto on the porch of its entrance not often associated with religious edifices: Facta non Verba!
Michael Karl

There is 1 review for this item. .

12,261 Views

70 Favorites

1 Review